Demotix Hooks DIY Journos Into Mainstream

Demotix is a new type of wire service designed to make it easier for international news stories by citizen journalists and freelance reporters to make it into the mainstream media.

The U.K. company is essentially a user-friendly middleman. For instance, a photographer in Afghanistan with an image of a car bombing can log in to the Demotix website and upload an image with caption info; Demotix reviews it and pushes it to the company's feed.

Then, news outlets like The Wall Street Journal, the Times of London and The Telegraph, etc., subscribe to the feed, just like they do for established news agencies like the Associated Press and Reuters, and buy stories and assets they deem important.

"It's a very, very simple process," says Turi Munthe, Demotix CEO and founder. "And whatever fee we make we split 50/50. Fifty for Demotix to keep us running and 50 for the contributor."

With the internet making it possible for anybody to break news at anytime, from almost anywhere, big media companies are looking for efficient ways to harness the power of what amounts to millions of beat reporters around the world. Efforts like AOL's new blogger network Seed and CNN's constant requests for viewer-submitted photos and video are making it easier than ever for journalists and average Joes to reach old-school media outlets' wide audiences.

Demotix, which has been nominated for the Community award at the SXSW 2010 Web Awards, employs five full-time staffers, five part-timers and a revolving crew of interns. Munthe says he hopes the company will be financially self-sustaining in 12 to 18 months.

Munthe comes from a rich background of journalism and Middle Eastern politics. He edited The Saddam Hussein Reader in 2002, set up a newspaper in Lebanon associated with the International Herald Tribune, had a teaching fellowship at New York University's religious studies department and worked for – as he calls it – "the most pompous defense think tank in London," the Royal United Services Institute. He's also been a talking head on most of the big global news networks and written for The Economist, Slate.com and The Nation, among others.

The idea for Demotix came out of Munthe's studies of the Middle East and the patterns he saw for why certain countries seemed to radicalize.

"There was a very clear – less clear now but nevertheless clear – inverse correlation between the openness of a society and its likelihood to radicalize," he says. "If you put a lid on a pressure cooker, it has a tendency to blow up."

Part of the solution, in Munthe's eyes, was to open up avenues of free speech in those countries to combat the trend.

"Demotix sort of emerges out of this silly realization that, built properly, you can create a safe haven for free speech, with all the results that free speech tends to have in repressive societies as in opening them up, changing the debate terms etc.," says Munthe.

The site now has 14,000 members in 110 countries. Munthe says he doesn't just wait for submissions, but establishes global news hubs to make assignments for particular event coverage. When asked about other journalism crowdsourcing sites like Spot.Us, which creates a marketplace for readers to fund the stories they think are important, Munthe acknowledges the limitations of Demotix.

"We love them because they do stuff that we do badly, which is investigative journalism," he says. "What we're good at is event-based journalism and collective, collaborative, participative newsgathering."

Demotix seems to potentially fill the gap left by the cutting of foreign news desks and other downsizing measures taken by the struggling news industry. It also gives locals a chance to report from their own perspective and disrupt the Western or corporate portrayal of their country. Munthe cites Bangladesh as a good example.

"The global narrative about Bangladesh," he says, "is that a whole lot of people live where they shouldn't and there's a washout every year and it's a nightmare." But he says he ran into a photojournalist there working on a photo essay about Bengal tigers eating children in villages because the surrounding forests were shrinking – a story that would most likely never come to light through mainstream outlets.

"It's no longer, 'White man goes off to tell stories in dark corners of the world and relating it back,'" says Munthe. "We're telling native stories in a native way and just creating a platform for the stories to get seen and potentially bought."